Stripper of the Day: "Ricky The Rocket"

While "Magic Mike" is in theaters we're looking back at memorable movie strippers

It's hard to know what possessed Oscar winning director John Avildsen to make the very trashy A Night in Heaven (1983), and less than a decade after his Rocky triumph at that. But make it he did. This one time paycable regular is about a schoolmarm community college professor named Faye (Lesley Ann Warren) who falls for a student named Rick (Christopher Atkins) once she sees, uh, more of him at her local bar's Ladie's Night. It takes place in Florida and considering that this is the only major theatrical motion picture about a male stripper before Magic Mike which also takes place there, does this mean that Florida is the capital of pelvic thrusts and loincloths... or just ceaselessly horny?

By day Rick's cocky glibness irritates Faye in speech class where she flunks him. But by night she discovers that he's "Ricky The Rocket", a star attraction. Ricky The Rocket immediately recognizes her during his space-age routine and in the film's cleverest visual beat, he's temporarily backlit by a halo as he moves toward her. 

His body may be heavenly but Rickie is no angel.  And he's definitely not safe for (Faye's) work...

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Stripper of the Day: Jacy Farrow

Michael C here. I think it's safe to say a lot more people can relate to Cybil Sheperd's striptease in Bogdonavich's The Last Picture Show than they can to Magic Mike.

Strippers in movies usually hit the stage with the confidence of Greek Gods and the choreography of Madonna's back-up dancers. Rarely do movies strippers capture the truth that even for people as stunning as a young Cybil Shepherd, the idea of undressing in front of a room full of strangers is the stuff of nightmares.  The Last Picture Show Bogdanovitch captures that feeling in excruciating detail.

In one of those scenes impossible to forget once seen, Sheperd's small town heartbreaker Jacy Farrow has given her sweetheart the slip and run off with doofy Randy Quaid to an out-of-town party where it's rumored there will be skinny-dipping. Cut to a record player and a dozen naked Texas teens arrayed around an indoor pool, filmed by Bogdonavich with a matter-of-factness that must have left jaws on the floor in 1971. 

come on in, the water's fine

One of the ringleaders delights in informing Jacy that newcomers have to undress out on the diving board in full view of everybody. Jacy feebly agrees, and it's here that the tension spikes...

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Stripper of the Day: "Helen Tasker"

While Magic Mike is in theaters we're celebrating memorable cinematic strippers

Beau here to discuss a reluctant exhibitionist, Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies.

It is one of the strangest of all strip scenes. Strange in the sense that, in less than five minutes, it accomplishes so much more than titillation. It anticipates that expectation, and rises above it; it is a telling of a woman looking at the walls she's built in her life and slowly, awkwardly, gracelessly pulling them down, like a feral animal. That she grows in confidence is only fitting, since by revealing herself physically, it's also a striptease she's performing for herself. Layers and a multi-faceted persona that surprise even her. It is the funniest striptease of the last twenty years (intentional, before I get hordes of Showgirls comments) and it is performed by the long underrated Jamie Lee Curtis in James Cameron's True Lies.

Curtis' Helen Tasker begins as a simple housewife, an estimation both the audience and the character accept from the get go. With a ninth grade math teacher's haircut and eyeglasses that would send Edith Head into a conniption fit, she is neo-Dowdy - Clarissa Brown removed and brought to the nineties, sans the lesbianism and suicidal tendencies. (Brat child still intact.)

[Helen unleashed after the jump]

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Stripper of the Day: "Nancy Callahan"

While Magic Mike is in theaters we're celebrating memorable movie strippers.

Just a horny excop watching an exotic dancer

Though Sin City (2005) plays like a compilation of short films rather than a traditional narrative feature, the story that's barely tying it all together features an old cop Hartigan (Bruce Willis) with a heart condition and his life-changing rescue of a kidnapped a little girl named Nancy Hallaway. Hartigan is punished for his good dead, framed as her rapist by a powerful senator and rots in prison. Nancy writes him weekly as "Cordelia". She grows up to be Jessica Alba. And as Hartigan says observantly in voiceover once he's out of the slammer and in her club...

She grew up. She filled out.

The club in question is  a "lousy saloon" called Kadies, specializing in Booze & Broads. It advertizes this way: "liquour upfront" and "poker in the back". [Ahem] Given Sin City's horny adolescent boy sexuality, it's impossible not to read that euphemistically.

Given the  Alba Mania circa 2005 you'd think her strip routine was the end game of movie stripteases but she doesn't actually take anything off. 

More after the jump...

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Box Office Special. A Sticky Cartoon Strip-a-Thon !

I didn't cover the box office last weekend in one of it's most interesting episodes. What's wrong with me? So today in honor of Channing Tatum's third consecutive $35 million plus opening last weekend (expect him to be offered every part for a 25-40 year old man in the next year, even the ones he's totally wrong for) a Magic Mike themed box office countdown to kick off Stripper Week. I'm pretending that the nation's #1 movie featured a musical stripping sequences a la Magic Mike. Just go with it. (File under: Anything to keep the commerce part of movie-going interesting. Cuz that's so notthe interesting part!)

Inappropriate Spider-Man cartoon (I made it*!) 

Box office chart after the jump...

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